


Robotic Butterflies

by fragilelittleteacup



Category: Almost Human, Firefly (referenced)
Genre: Assisted Suicide, Depression, Ethical Dilemmas, Genderfluid Character, Lesbian Character, Robot/Human Relationships, and Blade Runner, forgot id written it actually, found this kicking around, heavily inspired by Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, its pretty dark so be warned, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 13:54:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7643182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragilelittleteacup/pseuds/fragilelittleteacup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>DRNs were inherently flawed; they were too human.</p><p>(a DRN's untold story)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Robotic Butterflies

She walked through it all, and knew she did not belong here.

Whether one could belong there at all was debatable, but it was a truth that the beings here melded frantically into the dirty, neon, technological landscape–whether they intended to or not. They were possessed by their surroundings without the intent of belonging; a place to which no one could belong, because it held no actual meaning aside from the people within it. Merely empty streets and crowded space, devoid of purpose without the grind of the human race. Once, places had held meaning. Once, people had legacies and history and memory.

But now, even their humanity had fled them.

Vestiges of the tiny beings that they had been born as clung to them, but mostly they were enhanced beyond the point of retaining any semblance of purity. Purity; imperfection. Even babies were programmed, their DNA engineered to decrease the likelihood of disease and malformation. A perfect race. A species that directed its own evolution. Yet it still wasn’t enough. Their bodies were taken further, perfected even more, limbs replaced by metal and wires and carbon fibre, eyes glowing with unnaturally bright intensity, genitals cut off and replaced by other synthetic or grown body parts, laughs loud and tinkling and robotic.

Unattainable ideals of perfection had always existed for humanity, but she wondered whether this was the final frontier.

The need that would kill them all.

She sat on a set of steps, hood up, a cigarette between her fingers. She considered it distantly, noticed the thin shape of her fingers, the bones under her skin, the tattoos that had faded to a bluish black. No laser application either. Just plain old needles, skin inflamed and swollen and bleeding, lying back in a shitty tattoo parlour with her jaw clenched so tight it popped.

Pain meant something to her now. Experience. Emotion. It was all so much more important, in a world of synthetic alteration.

She raised the cigarette to her mouth and had a deep drag. Cigarettes from Sub-Asia. Cheap and nasty. Just how she liked it. She let it out in a clouded of stinking smoke, and watched it swirl in a dirty lingering haze. This kind of tobacco was rare, owing to society’s restrictions on everything. It was all so filtered now. So safe. Vapour as thin and tasteless and sweet as a virgin’s fucking breath.

She took another drag, and reflected that criminals could hardly be blamed. In her view, anyone who wasn’t driven insane by this kind of world was already a robot.

People–though she felt the term didn’t apply to all her eyes fell upon–passed by without looking at her. There were androids fucking everywhere, but even they weren’t interested in her, except possibly to quickly confirm with a scan that the delinquent lounging on the street wasn’t about to pull out a weapon and kill everyone. She was always being scanned, but then again, so was everyone else–without tech, without enhancements, she was as invisible as she could be.

Which was saying a lot.

She knew how to hide in other ways, ways that went deeper than scans and facial recognition. She, presently, was a he. Dressed in a collared shirt, chest bandaged up tight, a loose hoodie, skeletal hands dangling from her thin knees. Short hair, cut roughly with rusted scissors under the flickering light of a public toilet on the fringe of The Wall’s more habitable areas. Just enough of a sneer to her mouth to make her beauty masculine and offensive.

Often, she wondered if she’d have been like this in another world. Whether masculinity was in her blood, or this just started as a way to hide in an all-seeing world. Her family was gone, dead from a purge following an accidental outbreak of lab-borne disease. She had been one of the few survivors. Blessed children, hiding in a cupboard while their parents went cannibalistic outside. They called it the Pax virus. Broadcast on television channels worldwide for a few years, before the public lost interest and the next tragedy attracted their greedy gaze. As a child, she learned about death, first, then she learned about isolation.

No one remembered her parents, and eventually, no one remembered her. She knew it would be so, and realising this had made it easier to run from her foster family and from the other children that had survived. Change her name. Tattoo herself. Have sex too young. Become a full Luddite, one of the few people who dared to live without technology. It was a full-time business, living cleanly like that. It was an alternative lifestyle few could stand to support.

But it was worth it.

Because she owned her identity. Some days the world saw her as Jess Black, other days she was Jett Black, and it was up to her.

It was all up to her; not the machines.

She lifted the cigarette up again, breathed in deep, and out. The rain had begun to pour, coming–as it always did–with the faint smell of chemicals. Drinking water had to be filtered extensively.

She’d been Jett for almost a year now, turned herself into a man in almost every respect. It simply felt like the right thing to do. The most comfortable way to live.

A man near her shuffled along, playing a game on a floating screen. The neon lights lit up his haggard face, emancipated and bearded; unable to support himself, limping forward through life with his dull eyes fixed upon digitized realities. She regarded the screen with hate; that screen would sit idly by as he died, as he wasted away. She had an intense vision, for a moment, of the man lying dead, face lit dimly by the game he’d been unable to finish, played right up until his last hoarse breath.

The screen wouldn’t save him then.

A student pushed past, sprinting, her skirt bunching up as her legs pounded. Half her face was lit up by a screen that curved around her youthful face, showing she was following a map display.

Jett- for a moment gazing with interest after the student’s departing figure- rose from her slouch on the steps, movements lanky and skeletal, ankles rolling with emancipated limpness. Food was hard to come by, for people like her; people that only at the fresh stuff, the stuff free from pesticides and evolutionary engineering and the stimulus of artificial enhancements. She only ate what she considered to be real food, and so she rarely ate at all.

She pulled up her hood and walked slowly, ignoring the ache in her belly and the dryness of her mouth. Sucked in cigarette smoke to feel the burn and take the pain away, just for a moment. She needed to eat. She needed to drink.

But she wouldn’t allow herself to be poisoned by the technology. It was even in the water, now; atomised to the point of invisibility, monitoring drinkers’ bodily functions. Most people said the technology was for the people’s protection.

Jett thought they were fucking crazy.

She pulled up her hood, hunched over, lessening the chance of facial recognition. Moved through the crowds, feeling the people and machines around her like a writhing mass of flesh and metal, entwined so much that they were indistinguishable. Wires and cables straining alongside veins and muscles, teeth and mouths and eyes moving as they laughed and screamed. The _noise_ of it all. She walked faster, breathing hard. The cameras. The eyes. The lips and the hands.

“People look for connections in all kinds of ways,” a sexbot said, as Jett ran past. She glanced, mistakenly, up at the face; the smooth, blemish-free, smiling, hideously beautiful woman smiling down at her.

Stumbling, anger filling her starving stomach like bile, she ran.

 

 

***

 

 

Eventually, she found her way home.

Crossing borders wasn’t hard, and getting over The Wall was easy once you’d one it a few times. She wore a mask, when she was crossing over, slipping past the androids guarding it; a sheep mask. She’d had a pulse beacon installed on this minor section of The Wall, which told the androids that the sheep mask signified an authorised person.

It was the one piece of technology she used without fear.

Light flashed across the android guards’ plastic faces, reflected in their lifeless eyes.

“Welcome, Dolly,” they said. Dolly the Sheep. It’d been a joke, by the person who created the pulse. The only person she trusted. The only friend she had.

Her home, at present, was an abandoned factory mill, which had once been used for the production of handheld ‘smartphones’, which had been outdated for years. There were so many places like this, with their blank walls and vast emptiness, remnants of previous occupants littered throughout; memories of a time long gone, when technology hadn’t grown into its own sentient monster. Sometimes she couldn’t sleep. Sometimes she heard their voices.

But it helped that she wasn’t alone.

It was good to have one friend in the world. This world, that she hated so much.

The landscape changed, across The Wall. The disintegration of society, covered up by noise and chaos within the city, became dominant and undisguised, showing in the pale faces of the poverty-stricken people Jett lived alongside. She liked this place more than the city. The dilapidation, the cold, the exposure. The sheer _lack._ It was all so honest. So unfiltered. Untouched. Better to suffer than be taken over. Even if violence was rife, and she now knew exactly how to kill an attacker with nothing more than her hands.

“Ron?” She called out, entering the mill, hearing her footsteps echo, “Ron, you there?”

She eventually found him, sitting in what had once been an office. His dark skin, which had once been as flawless and smooth as that sexbot’s, was now covered in deliberate marks and slashes. He’d pulled his eyes out, removed the circuitry behind them that had connected him to the networks and wireless communications, and then replaced them. They didn’t sit right. Sometimes he couldn’t see properly, and Jett would take him by the hand, sit with him until he stopped shaking and could see again.

Odd, that her only friend in the world should be an android.

But he wasn’t just any android. He was a DRN; created with the express purpose of being as close to human as possible. Jett had always regarded the creation of DRNs as the most cruel act of humanity’s latest industrial boom, because they’d _succeeded._ Ron was human. He was a human being, trapped in the body of a machine, and he hated it. Sometimes, when she was empty and distant and hopeless, he would hold her and kiss her, and she knew he was more human than she was.

“You were out for a long time,” Ron said quietly, looking ahead with an unfocussed gaze. He had such beautiful eyes; blue as the sky. Designed to be beautiful. He’d once told her he hated his face, hated his reflection. He couldn’t even own his identity, because there was a legion of him out there; identical, indistinguishable, duplicated.

“Sorry.”

“Where were you?”

“Getting cigarettes. You know we can’t get any out here.” She moved closer to him, put a hand on his shoulder. She said ‘we’ because she liked to help him pretend he was human. She didn’t want a slip of the tongue to destroy him. “Fuck, what did you do to yourself? Can you see?”

“You’re going to get in trouble if you keep crossing The Wall.”

She ignored that; they’d had this conversation before. “Did you try to modify your circuitry again? You’ll end up killing yourself. Or blind yourself.”

“That wouldn’t be the worst thing,” he muttered after a pause, clearly having given up on his previous argument. He looked down, blinked a few times, and looked so vulnerable that she wanted to kiss him. This was her intimacy, now; empathising with broken things.

“You can’t see, can you?” She made sure to speak softly, because she was so hungry that she’d started to tremble from the pain, and the morning had left her angry. She didn’t want to be angry at him.

“No.”

“Anything I can do?”

“No.”

“What circuitry were you trying to modify?”

“I keep picking up signals from city radio, and I just… I just wanted them to stop.” He rubbed his face, prodding at his forehead, finger catching on a tear of artificial skin. She saw a flash of wires and synthetic brain matter. “But I don’t have the tools.”

“I’ll get them for you.”

“How?”

She shrugged. “I’ll steal them.”

He shook his head, agitated. “No, you won’t.”

“Ron-”

“ _No,_ you won’t risk yourself. Not for this.”

She sighed, wanting to sound exasperated, but she was too shaky for that, and far too hungry. She felt lighter than a sheet of screen, but more fragile. A leaf, she decided. Light as a leaf.

He reached up and touched her hand, blue lights flickering down his arm, just under the skin. “Jesus, you’re starving. Aren’t you? Why didn’t you say anything?”

She shrugged, and he stood.

“I’ll find you some food.”

 

 

***

 

 

They lit a fire on the floor, in what Jett had discovered was once a break room for employees. Back when factories and mills needed actual human workers.

Jett ate dehydrated fruit with vigour and enthusiasm, shoving the food down her throat, the tangy sweetness so close to heaven she was sure this would be all she’d ever need. She had been so hungry. No matter how many times she starved, she never got used to it.

Ron watched her, mournful. His sight had returned, though one eye was blue and the other was a featureless black, which meant it had stopped working entirely.

“I don’t think I can do this any more, Jett,” he said quietly.

She looked up at him. Those were words they’d exchanged frequently over the years, as they sunk into respective depressions. “You don’t have to watch me eat. I know it hurts you.”

“Even if I turn away, the truth will still be there.” He turned away from her, looked into the distance. “I’m not human.”

She chewed, leaned her head back against the table they’d upturned and were leaning against. “You’re _you,_ Ron.” She reached across, took his hand, drew her thumb the scratches and pits that scarred the skin there. “They can never take that away from you.”

He gazed into the fire. Orange turned his skin into a darker brown, shadows exaggerating the cuts on his face and the lines of his jaw and cheekbones, making him appear simultaneously more beautiful and more broken. She loved him, in a way that was different to how she loved women. She would never trust anyone else like this. She would never want to help anyone else like she needed to help him.

“I want you to move on with your life, Jett. I’ll never be able to move on with mine, because I don’t have one.”

She laughed. “Fuck off, Ron.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do, which is why I’m telling you to fuck off. We’ve talked about this before.” She pulled the pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, took one out, and stood. She ambled over to the fire, her dehydrated and starved swagger still keeping her unsteady, and held the cigarette close enough to the fire to light the end. Her hand shook. She watched it impartially, unconcerned when her fingers were singed.

“You need to find a home, Jett. You can’t keep living like this.”

She threw out her arms, laughed again. “Shut up! I’m not leaving you in this shithole by yourself, and I’m not living in the city! Not with all of the tech there!”

He looked up at her, with so much humanity and so much helplessness that she wanted to kick him. That expression inspired such tormented feelings of sympathy and hatred within her. She loved him, because he was _Ron._ But sometimes she forgot what he was; then she’d remember, and the distaste would come back, bitter as her cheap cigarettes. But it always faded. She needed him. She couldn’t hate him for what he couldn’t change. Her suffering was nothing to his.

“There are Luddite communities-”

“They’re monitored, Ron. For fuck’s sake, we’ve discussed this.” She fell next to him again, stuck the cigarette in her mouth, and leaned forward to unlace her boots. “I need to be off the grid.”

He watched her take her shoes off, silent.

Silence was a form of communication they were both very familiar with.

“I can’t.”

She looked up at him. He looked back at her, torn, and she felt something shift in the air. Something that made her chest tighten. His lips parted, trembling, and he said it again;

“I can’t.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but he was still holding her gaze, and the powerlessness in his eyes was something new. Something permanent. She had this sinking, horrifying feeling that she couldn’t change wherever his mind was going, couldn’t stop whatever idea he had.

“I need this to stop. I’ll never be human. I’ll never be able to be who I am.”

She stared at him. “What are you saying?”

He took her hand, and she felt her eyes start to water. She knew. She’d known for a while what he wanted.

“Would you do it? For me?”

Properly crying now, she felt something crumble inside. She knew she should fight, but she also knew that he wouldn’t; this was his final refusal.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
